Tools of Titans

by Timothy Ferriss

  “Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.”

  TF: This was related to gear, but it can be extended to much more.

  How Super Size Me Came to Be

  “I was sitting on my mom’s couch in a spectacular tryptophan haze, when a news story came on about these two girls who were suing McDonald’s. These girls said, ‘We’re fat, we’re sick, and it’s your fault.’ I thought, ‘Come on, that’s crazy. You’re going to sue somebody for selling you food that you bought, that you ate, and then blame them for it? How can you do that?’ Then a spokesperson for McDonald’s came on and said, ‘You can’t link our food to these girls being sick. You can’t link our food to these girls being obese. Our food is healthy. It’s nutritious. It’s good for you.’ I thought, ‘I don’t know if you can say that either. . . . If it’s that good for me, then shouldn’t I be able to eat it for 30 days straight with no side effects?’ And I was like: ‘That’s it.’”

  TF: Is there a common saying, or some public pronouncement, that you can disprove by making art about it? By doing a test? What makes you angry? (See Casey Neistat, page 217, and Whitney Cummings, page 477.)

  On Cheering for Yourself First

  “Touré is a great writer-commentator. He told me a story [about going to Kanye West’s house] once . . . and inside Kanye’s house, there’s a big, giant poster of Kanye right inside the living room. Touré asked, ‘Kanye, why do you have a giant picture of you on the wall?’ and Kanye goes, ‘Well, I got to cheer for me before anyone else can cheer for me.’ I thought, ‘There is some fantastic logic. That’s a good response.’”

  Story Trumps Cinematography

  Advice to aspiring filmmakers: “You can sacrifice quality for a great story. . . . I’ll watch shaky camera footage now . . . so long as it’s a great story and I’m engaged.”

  “Watching him light is like watching a monkey fuck a football.”—James Cameron

  This is one of Morgan’s favorite one-liners attributed to James Cameron, from a New Yorker profile of Cameron, “Man of Extremes.” I actually met Jim briefly through Peter Diamandis (page 369), as we went on a zero G flight (zero gravity parabolic flight) together. As part of the experience, which was a fundraiser for the XPRIZE, we all got crew shirts from the first Avatar production. The shirts have just three lines on them in huge font: hope is not a strategy. luck is not a factor. fear is not an option. I still wear the T-shirt for motivation during big projects, as I did for the final deadline sprint for The 4-Hour Body.

  Don’t Be Afraid to Show Your Scars

  “A friend of mine, a few years ago, gave me some good advice. He said, ‘You can’t be afraid to show your scars.’ That’s who you are, and he said you have to continue to stay true to that. I think that was some of the best advice I ever got.”

  ✸ Most-gifted or recommended book?

  The Living Gita: The Complete Bhagavad Gita—A Commentary for Modern Readers by Sri Swami Satchidananda

  ✸ Favorite documentaries

  The Fog of War (Errol Morris)—Many guests recommend this. It’s incredible and has an unbelievable 98% average on Rotten Tomatoes.

  Brother’s Keeper (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky)

  Hoop Dreams (Steve James)

  Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (Alex Gibney)

  What My Morning Journal Looks Like

  History is littered with examples of successful (and unsuccessful) people who kept daily journals, ranging from Marcus Aurelius to Ben Franklin, and from Mark Twain to George Lucas.

  But what on earth did they write about?

  Perhaps you’ve seen excerpts of their private journals and thought to yourself, “Goddamn, that reads like the Gettysburg Address!” and become demoralized.

  In this chapter, I’ll show you what my raw morning journal looks like and describe its function.

  Why?

  Because it’s messy, and seeing the mess can be encouraging. It’s easy to imagine our heroes as unflappable juggernauts, who conquer insecurity with a majestic mental karate chop every morning. This is, of course, a fantasy. Most people you see on magazine covers have plenty of mornings when they’d rather hide under the covers all day long.

  If you want to be wealthy—as measured in money, time, relationships, ease of sleep, or otherwise—“spiritual windshield wipers” will help you get there with fewer accidents and less headache. Let me explain. . . .

  The Daily Struggle

  * * *

  Nearly every morning, I sit down with a hot cocktail of turmeric, ginger, pu-erh tea, and green tea. Next, I crack open The Artist’s Way: Morning Pages Journal by Julia Cameron.

  The original Artist’s Way was first recommended to me by screenwriter and producer Brian Koppelman (page 613), so he’s to thank for this practice in my life. But I largely skipped the original—perhaps unfairly—as more book consumption didn’t interest me. I often use reading to procrastinate. What I needed was a daily and meditative practice of production, like a tea ceremony. So, voilà, I bought the journal. This “companion” provides plenty of context to be used by itself.

  To be clear, I don’t journal to “be productive.” I don’t do it to find great ideas, or to put down prose I can later publish. The pages aren’t intended for anyone but me.

  Morning pages are, as author Julia Cameron puts it, “spiritual windshield wipers.” It’s the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found. To quote her further, from page viii:

  “Once we get those muddy, maddening, confusing thoughts [nebulous worries, jitters, and preoccupations] on the page, we face our day with clearer eyes.”

  Please reread the above quote. It may be the most important aspect of trapping thought on paper (i.e., writing) you’ll ever encounter. Even if you consider yourself a terrible writer, writing can be viewed as a tool. There are huge benefits to writing, even if no one—yourself included—ever reads what you write. In other words, the process matters more than the product.

  Below is one of my real entries, which I’ve typed out for easier readability.

  * * *

  SUNDAY, DEC. 28, NEW YORK

  Woke up at 7:30 a.m., before everyone else. Feels great.

  It’s a Sunday, so I feel I can take it slow, which is probably the reason it feels great.

  Why should Monday or Tuesday be any different? There are still people waiting regardless. Let them wait.

  It’s funny how we work and aim and strive to get to a point where people wait for us, not the other way around. Cue Get Shorty!

  And yet, when we arrive at this vaunted point, the masses of people (often rightly) incessantly knocking on the door, one after another, causes far more stress than when you were a mere peon (sp)! [I was unsure of spelling.]

  Is it because of the 100x more inbound, which decreases a feeling of self-directed free will? A feeling that you’re constantly choosing from someone else’s buffet instead of cooking your own food?

  Or is it because you *feel* you must be defensive and protect what you have: time, money, relationships, space, etc.?

  For someone who’s “won” through a lifetime of offense, of attacking, playing the defensive game conflicts with the core of who they are.

  So . . . What’s the Point Again?

  * * *

  There are two ways to interpret the above journal entry, and they’re not mutually exclusive:

  1. I’m trying to figure things out, and this might help.

  For instance: I’ve identified conflicts between goals (become “successful” in some respect) and related side-effects (100x more inbound), which negate the benefits. I’ve also noted that my big wins in life have come from being aggressive, much like iconic coach Dan Gable, whose epic rants in the hard-to-find doc Competitor Supreme are worth finding. But the fetters of even moderate success makes one feel like they have to play defense, or manage ins
tead of conquer. This runs counter to my DNA, which leads to unhappiness. Therefore, I need to divest myself of assets that require “protecting,” or I need to better delegate this responsibility.

  That all sounds pleasantly analytical. Aren’t we smart? But perhaps the real value is that . . .

  2. I’m just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.

  If you take nothing from this chapter but #2 above and the next few lines, I’ll consider my mission accomplished.

  Morning pages don’t need to solve your problems. They simply need to get them out of your head, where they’ll otherwise bounce around all day like a bullet ricocheting inside your skull.

  Could bitching and moaning on paper for 5 minutes each morning change your life?

  As crazy as it seems, I believe the answer is yes.

  * * *

  Reid Hoffman

  Reid Hoffman (LI/TW: @reidhoffman, reidhoffman.org) is often referred to as “The Oracle of Silicon Valley” by tech insiders, who look at his company-building and investing track record (Facebook, Airbnb, Flickr, etc.) with awe. Reid is co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, which has more than 300 million users and was sold to Microsoft for $26.2 billion in cash. He was previously executive vice president at PayPal, which was purchased by eBay for $1.5 billion. He has a master’s degree in philosophy from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

  Behind the Scenes

  Reid, along with Matt Mullenweg (page 202), is one of the calmest people I’ve ever met. His former chief of staff has told stories of Reid responding to an insult with “I’m perfectly willing to accept that” and moving on.

  Reid was nicknamed “firefighter in chief” at PayPal by then-CEO Peter Thiel.

  Reid and I are both on the advisory board of QuestBridge, where he is the chair. QuestBridge supplies more exceptional low-income talent (i.e., kids) to top universities than all other nonprofits combined. QuestBridge has created a single standardized college application that’s accepted by more than 30 top universities like Stanford, MIT, Amherst, and Yale. This allows them to do some very innovative things, such as give away laptops and have the giveaway forms double as college applications. They then offer scholarships to many kids who could otherwise not even think of college. Did you know that roughly $3 billion available for scholarships goes wasted each year? It’s not a funding problem: It’s a sourcing problem. What Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s and Moneyball fame was to baseball, QuestBridge is to college education.

  How REID Developed the Ability to Deconstruct Problems and Interact with Many Stakeholders at Once (Credit Card Processors, Banks, Regulators, Etc.)

  “I think the most fundamental was, as a child, I played a lot of Avalon Hill board games, and each board game is actually a complex set of rules and circumstances.” Reid also read Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu as a boy, which informed his strategic thinking.

  For the Philosophy-Phobic, One Philosopher to Start With

  Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he’s taught a course at Oxford. “One of the bedrocks of modern analytic philosophy is to think of [language] . . . if you’re trying to talk to someone else about some problem, and you’re trying to make progress, how do you make language as positive an instrument as possible? What are the ways that language can work, and what are the ways that language doesn’t work?”

  TF: One of my all-time favorite quotes from dear Ludwig is: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.)

  It Doesn’t Always Have to Be Hard

  “I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of doing strategy is to solve the easiest problem, so part of the reason why you work on software and bits is that atoms [physical products] are actually very difficult.”

  TF: The bolded lines are key elements that I’m prone to under-examining. In doing an 80/20 analysis of your activities (simply put: determining which 20% of activities/tasks produce 80% of the results you want), you typically end up with a short list. Make “easy” your next criterion. Which of these highest-value activities is the easiest for me to do? You can build an entire career on 80/20 analysis and asking this question.

  Give the Mind an Overnight Task

  On a daily basis, Reid jots down problems in a notebook that he wants his mind to work on overnight. Bolding below is mine, as I think the wording is important. Note “might have” instead of “have,” etc.:

  “What are the kinds of key things that might be constraints on a solution, or might be the attributes of a solution, and what are tools or assets I might have? . . . I actually think most of our thinking, of course, is subconscious. Part of what I’m trying to do is allow the fact that we have this kind of relaxation, rejuvenation period in sleeping, to essentially possibly bubble up the thoughts and solutions to it.”

  He might write down “a key thing that I want to think about: a product design, a strategy, a solution to a problem that one of my portfolio companies is looking at,” or something else he wants to solve creatively before an upcoming meeting.

  Josh Waitzkin (page 577) has a near-identical habit, but he’s particular about when he writes things down—right after dinner and not before bed. To Josh, the pre-sleep gestation period of a few hours is important, as he doesn’t want to be consciously thinking about the problem when he gets under the sheets.

  Josh and Reid also mirror each other upon waking. Ideally, Reid budgets 60 minutes for the following: “The very first thing I do when I get up, almost always, is to sit down and work on that problem [I’ve set the day before] because that’s when I’m freshest. I’m not distracted by phone calls and responses to things, and so forth. It’s the most tabula rasa—blank slate—moment that I have. I use that to maximize my creativity on a particular project. I’ll usually do it before I shower, because frequently, if I go into the shower, I’ll continue to think about it.”

  TF: Reid and Josh’s descriptions led me to put the following quote at the top of my notebook: “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.”—Thomas Edison

  Additional Lessons from Ben Casnocha (FB: Casnocha), Reid’s Former Chief of Staff

  Reid’s First Principle Is Speed

  “We agreed I was going to make judgment calls on a range of issues on his behalf without checking with him. He told me, ‘In order to move fast, I expect you’ll make some foot faults. I’m okay with an error rate of 10 to 20%—times when I would have made a different decision in a given situation—if it means you can move fast.’ I felt empowered to make decisions with this ratio in mind, and it was incredibly liberating.”

  TF: “Foot faults” is a metaphor here. “Foot fault” literally refers to a penalty in tennis when you serve with improper foot placement, often due to rushing.

  On Vetting the Best Employees or Partners

  “How do you know if you have A-players on your project team? You know it if they don’t just accept the strategy you hand them. They should suggest modifications to the plan based on their closeness to the details.”

  Reid Seeks a Single Reason for a Potentially Expensive Action—Not a Blended Reason

  “For example, we were once discussing whether it’d make sense for him to travel to China. There was the LinkedIn expansion activity in China, some fun intellectual events happening, the launch of The Start-Up of You [Reid’s book] in Chinese. [There were] a variety of possible good reasons to go, but none justified a trip in and of itself. He said, ‘There needs to be one decisive reason, and then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason. If I go, then we can backfill into the schedule all the other secondary activities. But if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste of time.’ ”

  * * *
<
br />   Peter Thiel

  Peter Thiel (TW: @peterthiel, with 1 tweet and 130K+ followers; foundersfund.com) is a serial company founder (PayPal, Palantir), billionaire investor (the first outside investor in Facebook and more than a hundred others), and author of the book Zero to One. His teachings on differentiation, value creation, and competition alone have helped me make some of the best investment decisions of my life (such as Uber, Alibaba, and more).

  Back Story

  Peter is known as a master debater. When he appeared on my podcast, he answered questions submitted by my fans, which were upvoted on Facebook. Notice how often he reframes the question (examines whether the question is the right question) before answering. In several cases, how he dissects wording is as interesting as his answers.

  The “tools” in this profile are Peter’s thinking, and his macro-level beliefs that guide thousands of smaller decisions. His answers are worth reading a few times each, asking yourself afterward, “If I believed this, how would it affect my decisions in the next week? Over the next 6 to 12 months?”

  ✸ What do you wish you had known about business 20 years ago?

  “If you go back 20 or 25 years, I wish I would have known that there was no need to wait. I went to college. I went to law school. I worked in law and banking, though not for terribly long. But not until I started PayPal did I fully realize that you don’t have to wait to start something. So if you’re planning to do something with your life, if you have a 10-year plan of how to get there, you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? Sometimes, you have to actually go through the complex, 10-year trajectory. But it’s at least worth asking whether that’s the story you’re telling yourself, or whether that’s the reality.”